Equal Pay for Equal Work

Once again equal pay for men and women doing presumably equal work has become a live political issue. If Congress can achieve fair pay by passing still another law, why not?

But what is equal work? Is it the same numbers of hours spent? Is it work in the same industry or other category, broadly or narrowly defined? Is it work typically done by people with similar levels of education as proxied by diplomas and degrees? Are what economists call “compensating differences” unfair — differences in pay for work considered particularly risky or boring and work found attractive in itself? More plausibly, does fair pay mean equal pay for work appearing to promise the same addition to the revenue or profit of a business firm? If so, as judged by whom? Without attention to availability, productiveness, and costs of materials, energy, and other things bought, including the many kinds of labor, a firm would go broke.

More equal-pay legislation will add to the burdens already borne by business firms, perhaps especially small businesses.

An economic system coordinated otherwise than by market transactions and the interplay of prices, profit, and loss would be very different from the system that has brought prosperity to the Western world. A market economy puts to good use vast amounts of knowledge both specific and widely dispersed. This knowledge, as well as informed conjectures, exists in the minds of millions and billions of consumers, employees, job candidates, entrepreneurs, and owners and managers of business firms and other organizations. Knowledge of how to conduct and mesh their activities simply could not be centralized for effective use by planners and regulators. The writings of Mises and Hayek (and, earlier, Henry George), reinforced by experience in Communist countries, have taught us this lesson. Even if, per impossibile, this knowledge could be centrally deployed, politicians would have incentives to disregard much of it.

Business owners and managers, sometimes aided by specialist consultants, can best judge how to structure their workplaces and employ the people most likely to contribute to profits. Supply and demand interacting on markets, including the labor market, contribute to these judgments. Business losses tend to weed out bad judgment of these kinds, while profits tend to reward good judgment.

Employers must judge how likely employees or job candidates are to fit in well with their businesses. How likely is a person to be available for working long or irregular hours on short notice or for shifting among assignments and geographical locations? How committed is the person to a career, or how likely to quit or interrupt work for family or other reasons or to request many hours or even months of paid or unpaid leave? How likely is the person to generate profitable new ideas? How likely to get along well with customers, colleagues, and supervisors? Or how likely to prove obnoxiously litigious? A good matching of jobs and employees benefits all concerned.

Realistically, of course, employers cannot have all the detailed and ineffable knowledge necessary for ideal decisions. They must make judgments based on categories, experience, probabilities, statistics, and hunches, and perhaps sometimes even on stereotypes. These regrettable gaps in knowledge are not blameworthy or avoidable, although detailed experience and practiced intuition may shrink them. The system of markets, profit, and loss tends, at least, to reward or punish good or bad business judgment; nothing similar weeds out bad legislation.

Government regulators drift into thinking that their own work is important.

More equal-pay legislation will add to the burdens already borne by business firms, perhaps especially small ones. These will include the burdens of keeping records of and reporting on job interviews held or not held, performance reviews, job categories and modifications, and innumerable other things. Risks compound the burdens, including risks of being second-guessed about honest judgments and of dubious statistics being manipulated to infer violations of rules even in the absence of evidence. Government regulators drift into thinking that their own work is important and into eagerly receiving and investigating complaints. Aggrieved employees have additional ways to browbeat their employers by threatening to file complaints or lawsuits. Opportunities for lawyers multiply.

The burdens placed on job creation are heavy already. They apparently help account for the disappointing growth in employment as recovery from the recession continues only sluggishly.

Yet far from being morally obliged to bear such burdens and risks, businesspeople are under no obligation to be in any business or hire any workers at all. Even employing job candidates willing to work for less pay than others appearing similarly qualified is a service to workers and the public (even if a less noble service than one might wish). Employing anybody increases the scarcity value and the job and pay prospects of the rest of the labor force. Employers practicing discrimination unrelated to the value of employees’ work suffer the penalty of reduced profit and lose ground to firms showing sounder business judgment.

Speaking of fairness, how fair is it to draft businesspeople more and more into unpaid and thankless service as social-welfare agencies and as scapegoats?

Making a political issue of “fair pay” expands opportunities for politicians and demagogy. It illustrates how superficial bright ideas can get casually inserted into laws, notably into laws running hundreds or thousands of pages. As Thomas Sowell has explained, being both economically literate and honest is a disadvantage for a politician. (An economically illiterate one can honestly advocate bad but popular legislation, while a dishonest politician may gain votes by concealing his economic understanding.)

My message, in summary, is dismay at ignorance or disregard of how essential using widely dispersed specific knowledge is to a prosperous economy.

One State in Palestine

Seldom am I inclined to support a member of the Obama administration, but Secretary of State Kerry deserves defense against abuse for mentioning the unsatisfactory alternatives to a two-state solution in Palestine. If the single state allowed equal political rights to all its inhabitants, the Arabs would outvote and outbreed the Jews and deprive the state of its distinctively Jewish character.

Isn’t that obvious and worth recognizing? Kerry was arguing for two states, not a single state with apartheid.

The word “apartheid” may be an unfortunate term for inequality of rights. If so, let the critic suggest a better one. Meanwhile, we should recognize that words often do get applied beyond their original uses. This stretching can be forgivable and even useful, as it is in Kerry’s case.

Not with a Bang, but a Whimper

The most recent news on the UAW’s attempt to unionize the VW autoworkers in Chattanooga, Tennessee is interesting.

Despite enormous advantages, including the Obama administration’s blatantly partisan efforts to game the game in favor of the UAW, the union lost the vote. The union that nearly destroyed the American automakers, gleefully driving two of them into bankruptcy — a bankruptcy that ripped off taxpayers for tens of billions of dollars and left one of the companies merely a division of the Italian automaker Fiat — couldn’t overcome its unsavory reputation and convince the workers that it wouldn’t destroy their jobs and city as well.

That was in February. Immediately after the vote, the UAW filed an appeal with the Obama-rigged National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), even though it had earlier said it would abide by the will of the workers. But just before the deadline for its lawyers to appear and argue for voiding the vote, the UAW dropped its appeal. It turned tail and ran.

This capitulation came as a surprise. The union had aggressively pursued the plan, issuing subpoenas against the Republican governor of the state, Bill Haslam, and one of its Republican US senators, Bob Corker, to turn over their staff emails regarding the election, under the theory that the two men wrongfully influenced workers to oppose the UAW. The theory, then, is that the UAW is free to spend tens of millions of its members’ dues every election cycle to defeat Republicans, but the targets have no right to criticize the UAW in return. The UAW is nothing if not fair.

One of the workers who organized the vote against the union, Mike Burton, admitted that he couldn’t explain why the UAW gave up so easily. UAW president Bob King would only say that his outfit wanted to put the “tainted election in the rearview mirror ... and focus on advocating for new jobs and economic investment in Chattanooga.” But the real explanation was suggested by the Wall Street Journal in an editorial from the same day, namely, that even if the NLRB ordered another election at the plant, the UAW would very likely have lost it — making the union look even worse. The editorial also suggested that the UAW may have been afraid that anti-union workers would sue it for violating the Taft-Hartley Act, which prohibits a company from giving a “thing of value” to any union seeking to organize its workers. This VW clearly did by giving the UAW the right to voice its arguments in the plant while denying the same right to the anti-union workers.

I would add the speculation that — given the recent revelations that GM knowingly covered up defects in its cars, defects that killed a number of people, while it was grabbing billions in taxpayer dollars in the bankruptcy operation — the UAW probably fears reminding people that it was behind the crony deal.

The latest defeat for the union comes on the heels of the failure of its drive to organize workers at a Canton, Mississippi, Nissan plant, and its lack of luck so far in organizing the workers at the Vance, Alabama, Mercedes-Benz plant.

These failures couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.

About this Author

Gary Jason is an academic philosopher and a senior editor of Liberty. His recent books, Disturbing Thoughts: Unorthodox Writings on Timely Issues and Philosophic Thoughts: Essays on Logic and Philosophy are both available through Amazon.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Cliven Bundy?

Robert Duvall was born to play Cliven Bundy. The story of Cliven Bundy’s stand against the federal government has all the components of a great movie, except one: we don’t have an ending. Will it end in tragedy like the Branch Davidian standoff outside Waco, or will the ending be triumphant and peaceful?

If you haven’t followed the story, here’s a summary: Cliven Bundy’s family started its ranch northeast of what is now Las Vegas in 1877. Their cattle have grazed on the surrounding government land ever since. In 1993, the Bureau of Land Management tried to buy Cliven’s grazing rights to protect the desert tortoise. Cliven refused to sell. Then the BLM revoked the grazing rights. Cliven never applied for them to be renewed, and his cattle continued to graze on the land. The courts upheld the revocation of the grazing rights, and last fall gave Cliven 45 days to remove his cattle from government land. He didn’t remove them. The fines and fees that Cliven owes now total more than a million dollars. On April 5, 2014, the BLM began an operation to seize Cliven’s cattle. BLM Law Enforcement Rangers and Special Agents came, as did people who sympathized with Cliven. An armed standoff followed. On April 12, the BLM decided not to execute the court’s order, citing a “serious concern about the safety of employees and members of the public.” (The above is gleaned from Jamie Fuller’s April 15 post on the Washington Post blog “The Fix.”)

On April 14, on KRNV television in Reno, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada told reporter Samantha Boatman, "Well, it's not over. We can't have an American people that violate the law and then just walk away from it. So it's not over” (MyNews4.com).

Senator Reid’s has asserted that people can’t be allowed to get away with breaking the law. The assertion is, of course, false.

If Harry Reid says that it’s not over, you can be pretty sure that it’s not over. But what to do? Viewed strictly as a legal matter, Cliven’s an outlaw. To many Americans, however, Cliven’s cause appears to be just; to some, it’s worth fighting for. Even if you set aside accusations of nepotism against Reid and family, the influence of Chinese money, and the manipulation of the EPA, Cliven has many supporters who simply believe that the federal government has grown too big for its britches. With the addition of these viral accusations, proven or not, the number of supporters grows, as does their enthusiasm for the cause. How is this problem to be solved without bloodshed? I think I know a way. (To find out more about the allegations, start here.)

The solution lies in Senator Reid’s assertion that people can’t be allowed to get away with breaking the law. The assertion is, of course, false. People are allowed to get away with breaking the law. An example comes to mind.

On June 15, 2012, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, sent a memo to three of her underlings telling them that illegal immigrants with certain characteristics would be allowed to have work permits and a renewable two-year deferral of removal from the country. On that same day, President Barack Obama announced the change on TV from the lawn of the White House. It was thought at the time that about 800,000 people who had entered the country illegally would benefit from this memo, which was referred to as an act of prosecutorial discretion. (A summary of that act and an overview of prosecutorial discretion can be found in my earlier Liberty piece “Prosecutorial Indiscretion.”)

So. President Obama has shown Senator Reid the way to a triumphant and peaceful ending. All that needs to happen is for the Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell to send a memo to the Director of the Bureau of Land Management (Neil Kornze, Senator Reid’s chief aide until March of this year). The memo need only say that Cliven Bundy is to be allowed to have his grazing permit back and that all fees and fines levied against him are forgiven. To make things “just so,” President Obama would have to announce this act of prosecutorial discretion on the White House lawn. I think the President could be convinced to play himself in the movie.

Fade to black

About this Author

S.H. Chambers is a cartoonist whose books Mock Hypocrisies, Zeitgeist Kebab, and Entertaining Blasphemies are available at shchambers.com. Over the last twenty years, thousands of his cartoons have appeared in Liberty, National Review, Mouth, and Bostonia, among others.

Entitlement Drives Amok

They’re calling her a road rage hero, this woman who filmed a driver flipping her off as he passed her on the highway just moments before he lost control of his car and slid across three lanes, coming to rest in the opposite direction on the opposite side of the road. “Good for her!” people are saying. “Poetic justice.” “She showed him!”

Well, what exactly did she show him? In my opinion, she’s no hero. She caused this accident, and she should be grateful that no one was killed or seriously injured. This is an example of entitlement run amok.

First, what was she doing in the fast lane if she didn’t want to drive as fast as the person behind her? Apologists are saying that she couldn’t move over because there was too much traffic, but that simply isn’t true. If the driver behind her had enough space to pass her on the right, she had enough space to move over.

She caused this accident, and she should be grateful that no one was killed or seriously injured.

Second, she should be cited for distracted driving. Instead of watching the road (at 60 miles an hour!) she was using her cellphone to film the other driver, not only when he was beside her, but when he was behind her! In New York she would have been slapped with a $500 fine and five points on her license. And she would have deserved it. Instead, people are applauding her chutzpah. Sheesh.

Third, she contributed mightily to this man’s frustration. She taunted him with her phone and deliberately went slow in the fast lane, controlling it. She cackled with delight when she saw his car flipping around. Fortunately no cars were coming toward him as he spun out into the opposite lane, but many lives could have been lost or forever changed.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not defending the man who felt the need to flip her off instead of just driving away. He was distracted too, looking to his left instead of watching the road, and he paid the price in a ruined pickup and a ruined reputation. But driving requires the utmost courtesy. This is one place where even libertarians should yield property rights to bullies and get out of the way when someone else wants the road. You never know when some crazy lady with a cellphone is going to push you — or someone driving behind you — right over the edge.

About this Author

Jo Ann Skousen is the founding director of the Anthem Libertarian Film Festival and a co-producer of FreedomFest, where 2,500 attendees and 200 speakers gather each year to discuss new ideas in science and technology, history and politics, health and well-being, art andliterature, economics and finance. This year’s FreedomFest is in Las Vegas on July 8–11, and its theme is Discover the New American Dream.

Post-Traumatic Story Disorder

The latest of our nation’s mass-media-broadcast shootings took place yesterday (April 2) at Fort Hood, where a gunman—according to reports, one Ivan Lopez—murdered 3 and wounded 16 before killing himself.

Given the ghoulishness of the 24-hour-cycle press, it’s unsurprising that their first, hopeful question was whether this was a terrorist attack. Given their stupidity, it’s also unsurprising that, once they found out poor Lopez was just some guy possibly suffering from PTSD following a stint in Iraq, they reached precisely the wrong conclusion: that this wasn’t about terrorism after all.

You idiots. Of course it’s about terrorism. It’s all about our government’s stupid, belligerent, macho response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, knocking over countries with little or no connection to those attacks, in the mistaken belief that we could run those countries better than they were already being run. It’s all about how Congress and the military have removed hundred of billions of dollars from the American economy in order to build and maintain palatial outposts of Empire, only to strand our people there at the first sign of trouble. It’s all about how we continued to recruit unfledged and underemployed men and women and dispatch them into conditions that favored the advancement of sadists and psychopaths, places where anyone of normal disposition would end up damaged in mind, if not also in body.

When the networks say it’s not about “terrorism,” what they mean was the shooter wasn’t Muslim, or they can’t connect him to any extremist groups at home or abroad—more’s the pity for them, deprived of their latest bogeyman, their newest Tsarnaev or Nidal Hasan. Lopez, if it is him, is just some schmuck they can’t fit into a preexisting narrative; at least, not one they’re willing to broadcast. But the story’s clear enough to anyone who doesn't purposefully blind themselves to it.

Apple Pie, Puppy Dogs, and Sunshine

Those promoting a political idea usually sell it to the public by portraying it as pure wonderfulness. “We want apple pie, puppy dogs, and sunshine for everybody!” And really, who wouldn’t want that?

I thought that by now I would have finished with the recently-failed Arizona SB 1062 “religious freedom” bill — the subject of my previous essay in Liberty. But the reaction my opinion has received, from several people I know, makes me realize I’ve only scratched the surface of a deeper problem, one that is, in the long run, far more interesting. To those of us who love to watch political theater for the sheer entertainment of it all, the phenomenon is fascinating indeed.

As the state held its breath to see if the governor would sign or veto SB 1062, I sat in an ice cream parlor with some friends. Inevitably, the subject came up, and I gave my take on it. Across the table from me, my friend John underwent an amazing transformation. For a moment, I thought he was going to turn into the Incredible Hulk.

Leaning into his whipped cream, his eyes bulging and forehead arteries popping, he said, “It’s about religious freedom, okay?!”

Apple pie, puppy dogs, sunshine, and religious freedom for everybody. Okay? But where does this leave people who know there’s a poison pill inside that candy shell?

Issues are framed this way, by those who promote them, so that anyone who opposes them looks like the baseborn child of Snidely Whiplash and Tokyo Rose. I like John very much, so I didn’t want to leave him with that impression. “I don’t think the bill would really do what it’s claimed to be trying to do,” I said. And then I told him why.

We are not an unfeeling nation. We do a powerful lot of feeling. But that we do precious little thinking has become painfully obvious.

Three or four people — out of all the millions in this country — filed silly lawsuits against merchants who refused, “for religious reasons,” not to serve them. We would never accept the notion that because of what three or four heterosexuals did, all of them should be judged guilty. But that is exactly what was done here. And it is done to gays and other minorities all the time, and for no other reason, apparently, than because it can be.

How does that serve liberty? How is it possible, on such a basis, even to make an intelligent or responsible decision about legislation — which is itself government intrusion, no matter how attractively it’s packaged — that affects the lives of millions? Appeals to wield the club of government this way are nearly always made on the basis of raw emotion. A free people who would remain free would be wise to pause, breathe, and think about the issue in the light of fact.

John responded to my opinion not with reason but emotion. He may have thought he was giving me a reason — “religious freedom” — but I was not questioning whether that is a good thing. I was challenging whether religious freedom would best be served by the bill proposed. I thought the measure taken was too extreme to be warranted by the incidents that provoked it, which might better be addressed in other ways. And I thought that its passage would bring consequences not only unintended but undesirable.

As I suggested in my previous piece on the subject, we could reform the civil court system to discourage frivolous lawsuits. If we absolutely could not resist passing yet another law protecting religious freedom, we could include a clause requiring merchants who would refuse to serve certain patrons to post their policy publicly. Far better, we could sidestep government coercion altogether and encourage those who proudly serve all customers without bias to participate in a plan to publicize this. In Arizona, for example, businesses can take the Unity Pledge. As those wishing to refuse same-sex couples’ business for religious reasons have no justification for hiding their light under a bushel, it’s difficult to see why they would want to keep their convictions a secret.

Other people with whom I have discussed this legislation have responded the same way John did. Motivated by passion, they want to act on passion. On cue, everybody — feel, feel, feel!

I might suggest that we are not an unfeeling nation. We do a powerful lot of feeling. But that we do precious little thinking has become painfully obvious.

Majorities tend, all too often, to resort to brute force. They do it simply because they are the majority, so they can get away with it. This is behavior conducive not to liberty but to license. Those who worship the power of the state seem unable to distinguish between the two. Those who believe in liberty — if we would keep that liberty — would be wise to make the distinction.

About this AuthorLori Heine is a freelance journalist and playwright from Goldwater country. Her work is most often seen in the LGBT Christian magazines Whosoever and The Epistle.

A Mysterious Death

A week or two ago, a man was sent to repair a hole in a roof in a nice ranch house on a nice street in Pontiac, Michigan. He had been sent by the bank that had foreclosed on the house for nonpayment of its mortgage. In the process of repairs he discovered a car in the garage, containing the mummified body of a woman. It was mummified because it had been enclosed in the car for six years.

The woman was thought to have spent a lot of time traveling, so she wasn’t expected to be around at any particular time. Anyway, nobody cared. As long as her bank account had money in it, her mortgage payments continued to be made by her computer. Utilities were paid in the same way. Her next-door neighbor continued to mow her lawn whenever he mowed his own lawn. Nothing appeared to be out of order. It was 2,000 normal days in Pontiac, Michigan, where $54,000 in a bank account can go a long way. As it should.

At this point, you may be shaking your head and muttering, “Look at the way things are in this modern, heartless, automated society.” But I, for one, am not muttering.

One reason is that I myself am from Michigan. The Pontiac story is a picture of what Michiganians are like. At least outstate Michiganians, meaning people who don’t live in Detroit. Michigan is full of odd expressions like “outstate.” It’s also full of people for whom it’s perfectly normal not to care about their neighbors. No, there’s nothing wrong with mowing the neighbor’s yard for her — why not? You’ve got a lawnmower. Might as well help her out. But why should you insist on talking to her? I can’t think of a reason.

As to dying in your garage: to this the Michiganian responds, “Where would you rather die?”

I remember how surprised I was when I got acquainted with my relatives in downstate Illinois (that’s Illinoisans’ dully predictable expression for people who don’t live in Chicago) and found that they actually knew what was up with their next-door neighbors. Sometimes the neighbors came strolling into the house with barely a yoo-hoo, on the mere pretext that their families had lived on the same block for a hundred years. The nerve!

Now, as to dying in your garage: to this the Michiganian responds, “Where would you rather die?” Would you rather freeze to death on your way from the house to the garage, like the old lady from the Upper Peninsula who was found frozen in her back yard (after which it was discovered that she had never been outside the Upper Peninsula of Michigan even once in her life)? No, you’d rather die in the garage, and better yet, in your car, where you’re comfortable and looking forward to a good trip. The lady in the Pontiac had her key in the ignition. She was ready to go.

But the second reason I am not muttering in protest is that I don’t find this vision of America in all its lack-of-community, bowling-alone, atomized-and-uncaring individualism (if that’s what it is) the least bit disturbing. The dead woman had planned her life and was leading it in the way she wanted. Presumably she had friends somewhere, and spent time with them. If she didn’t, she didn’t want to. I can’t see that getting together with her neighbors to scrub the curbs or neuter stray cats or attend weekly meetings of the zoning board would have enhanced her spiritual life. If there was a chance that it might have, she could have taken that chance. She didn’t. Probably she considered herself blessed enough already — blessed to live in a capitalist country where people can pay their bills on their own, without consulting anyone; a country where they can go away for months at a time without anybody “worrying” about them — anybody whom they themselves wouldn’t worry about; a country where neighbors can lend a hand without exacting the tribute of a feigned “community.”

This woman had a happy life — and if it wasn’t happy, she had only herself to blame. Contrast the millions, yea billions, of other people, people who have lived in other times and places, people who have been starved, butchered, tortured, or, as my ancestors used to say, “bothered half to death” in the circle of a close community. This woman was not a martyr; this woman was the symbol of a calm and tolerant society.

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution.

Earps vs. Clantons at the Tolerance Corral

Arizona has a reputation as a politically nutty state. I’ve lived here all my life, and I prefer to think of it as Goldwater country: a feisty outpost of individual independence. I don’t like the idea that millions of other Americans think I live in loony-land, but given our occasional, highly publicized spasms of hysteria, I can see where they get the notion.

We’re seen as the Wild West. Land of the O.K. Corral. Still, at heart, an untamed territory, crawling with cowboys and yokels. But I don’t think our problem is really that different from problems anywhere else in America. We’re degenerating into an entire nation of spoiled and very bratty children.

We all remember the bullies from elementary school. Most of us had some classmates we liked, and others we didn’t. If we didn’t like somebody, we probably hung around with somebody else. But bullies aren’t content simply to dislike people. When they dislike us, they want to make it our problem.

There are bullies on both sides of the “tolerance” issue. I view the conflict with the detachment born of distaste. I don’t see why spoiled children, on either side, should carry the day. In this instance, thanks to Gov. Jan Brewer, they haven’t.

The other evening after Mass, some of my very left-of-center friends summed up our latest brush with lunacy by saying, “Well, the governor did the right thing by vetoing that stupid bill . . . but after all, it was just business.” Our Republican governor, in other words, pandered to those evil business interests. What a neat and tidy way to make sense of it all.

I know why the opinion-shapers to whom they listen are telling them that. Because the statist left is getting ready to punish the “religious freedom” crowd by pushing for statewide public accommodations laws, forcing every merchant to serve everybody. Now that they’ve won one showdown, their blood is up and they’re spoiling for another. It’s the Earps versus the Clantons all over again.

Hurting people’s feelings is not a crime, and it never should be. If peace is to reign in any society, those who simply want peace must be permitted to have it.

Many social conservatives will see this as all the gays in the state conspiring to violate their precious religious freedom. Though many gay people I know express opinions similar to mine, I can speak for no one but myself. I simply want to be left the hell alone. I want to live in peace.

I think it’s high time the Wild West was tamed, but I don’t think the Man with the Badge is the one to tame it. We, the ordinary citizens, need to tame it ourselves. I’ve seen enough of those old westerns to know that when the marshal rides into town, that’s when the real shooting starts.

Let’s begin with some clarification of what “public accommodation” means. Police, fire protection, and other basic, life-and-death services — for which we are all taxed to pay, regardless of our sexual orientation — are the true public accommodations, and as such, they must remain available to everybody. It is the marshal’s job to protect us all, whether he likes us or not.

Those of us who respect liberty are interested in a solution that lets you be you and me be me. One that doesn’t force anybody to do anything. Bullies aren’t interested in peaceful compromise. They want a shootout every day. There are plenty of bullies on both the right and left, and those of us who want to clean up the town need to stop letting them goad us into needless conflicts.

When Arizona’s SB 1062 was being slopped together into a bill, it was suggested that a clause be added mandating that merchants who wanted to take advantage of the religious exemption publicly post that they were doing so. They didn’t like this. Not only did they want to be able to deny service to those of whose “lifestyles” they disapproved (meaning gays), but they wanted to be cowards about it. Though I agree that they should be free to discriminate against me, I do, however, think it’s only fair that they should warn me. According to my own religious convictions, bigotry is a sin. I believe that the Religious Right is as close to an Antichrist as any entity has ever been, and I don’t want one dime of my money supporting it. I don’t like these people, and I want no more to do with them than they do with me. But if they leave me alone, I’m perfectly content to leave them alone.

Along with reforming our civil court system to discourage frivolous lawsuits (like gay couples suing photographers for refusing to take their wedding pictures), we should exempt from litigation merchants who loudly and proudly post warnings that — because they’re such good Christians — they refuse to serve gays. That would bring an end to the clamor for heavy-handed legislation to protect the religious freedom of everybody who decides, willy-nilly, to discriminate against everybody else. It would also take the state out of the business of determining whose religious beliefs are really “sincere” and whose are not. Hurting people’s feelings is not a crime, and it never should be. If peace is to reign in any society, those who simply want peace must be permitted to have it.

I’m very glad we’ve gotten rid of lynching, and I’d like to see the gunfights come to an end. But there’s one Old West tradition I’d very much like to see revived. Some people ought to be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. Those who persist in disturbing the peace by making their dislikes everybody else’s problem richly deserve to be dispatched in this way. When the mob forms to clear the country of them, I’ll be the first in line.

About this AuthorLori Heine is a freelance journalist and playwright from Goldwater country. Her work is most often seen in the LGBT Christian magazines Whosoever and The Epistle.

The Political Philosophy of the Crimean Crisis

I tried to resist, but I can’t. At the risk of being accused of pro-Soviet tendencies, I have to comment on a bizarre but real report in The Telegraph (March 6):

As European leaders [who else?] met in Brussels [where else?], President Barack Obama denounced plans for a referendum on whether the occupied Crimea region should join Russia as a “violation” of international law.

A violation of Ukrainian law, doubtless; but how does international law get into it? And just who is it that deliberates on international law, passes it, and provides for its amendment? Doubtless “European leaders.” So can they decide that Crimea should be part of Ukraine, despite all evidence that the majority of its population doesn’t want things that way? But to continue:

“We are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratic leaders,” he [President Obama] said.

I can’t make sense of that. Can you? Apparently, borders can be redrawn; that, in fact, is what he’s objecting to.

Now, there are strong arguments that borders should not be redrawn, no matter what. No matter what nationalisms are involved, no matter what petty religious or historical or linguistic disputes are available, the peace of Europe demands, or at least requests, that changes not take place in the continent’s frequently arbitrary borders. (I note, as I have before, that the Crimea became part of Ukraine by fiat of the Soviet dictatorship. So much for “law.”) Any people that wants to institute the kind of political changes that will bring it the blessings of prosperity would do well to drop its more exuberant forms of nationalism, accept whatever borders have been dealt to it, and think in terms of freedom for the individual, not vengeance for the ethnos.

None of this is a rational political philosophy. It’s just a dumber form of the old statist shell game.

But that’s not what Obama is saying. He’s saying, or seems to be saying, that “leaders,” who are also supposedly “democratic,” get to decide. Does that mean Putin? Apparently it must — though that’s not what Obama wants his words to mean. And how about the Ukrainian president, the one whom Ukrainian revolutionaries just kicked out? Also a democratic leader. Should he decide the fate of the Crimea? But what about the people who are being led? Do they get to say anything? No, they don’t. Not according to Obama. He wants no referendum. Does he suspect that it would be about as democratic as an election in Chicago? Or is he offended that he, the biggest of all democratic leaders, would have no say in its results?

None of this fits. None of it holds together. None of it is a rational political philosophy. It’s just a dumber form of the old statist shell game, in which the principle of legitimacy passes from “the people” to “the leaders” and back again, over and over, and where it lights is simply the place on the sidewalk where the politicians squat in a circle and play their games according to the rules they make up.

And what rules can we expect from a president who suggests, according to the same news report, that the Crimean crisis can be “resolved diplomatically in a way which would satisfy Ukraine, Russia and the international community.”

Satisfy them? Satisfy them all?

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution.